Wassup Mises Institute? First, I want to thank you for the seemingly unlimited supply of resources and knowledge you contain at this site (for free at that). I must say I've learned more in two months from Mises.org, lew rockwell and various other sites than I did my whole life at public school.
With that being said, I guess I'll tell you a little about myself since I'll often be on here looking for answers and ways to strengthen my arguments. I'm a 19 year old Mexican American male, hoping to gain enough knowledge of libertarianism and anarchist capitalism, to be able to promote it to not just Hispanics and minorities, but everyone in general. Nothing is worse than being the only libertarian in a sociology or history class full of left-wing liberals and ingnorant people, who seem to have no sense of how a entrepreneur works or operates, yet still try to blame them for all of societies problems.
I guess I've always enjoyed capitalism because of what it promotes and represents. My dad came here in the 80's dirt poor with nothing and was able to grow economically and help his family back home. (He also became an addict and victim of the "war on drugs", but that's beside the point). I have an uncle and a cousin both on my Mom's side, who also started out with nothing and grew up dirt poor. My uncle now owns a successful business for about 20 years, and my cousin owns several houses. They are everything that capitalism represents; having the oppurtunity to come from nothing to something, not from changing laws or affrimative action, but through hard work, determination and the learnings of new skills.
Anyway, I don't wan't to get to caught up with me or my family, I just wanted to let you guys know why I love capitalism and why libertarianism and the Austrian School of Economics was so easliy appealing to me.
Back to the point: I see a real opportunity right now to spread the ideas of libertarianism and the Austrain School, as the economy is headed towards the toilet. As long as you guys can clear up as much information and questions I may have, then I'll do my best to spread the word to everyone. NOW IS THE TIME TO CHANGE!
Welcome!
Any reading reccomendations you may need, or questions you may have I would be happy to answer.
Welcome to the family!
At least he wasn't a Keynesian!
I'm pretty much completely sold on anarchy (anatomy of the state changed my life), theres just a few things I still need to fully understand. Suppose everybody woke up tommarow with no government and each seperate community enventually ends up with their own voluntary governments that they agree on. If every communtiy has laws that can vary greatly, how will these communities still be able to work with each other? For instance let's say someone lives in one community but works in another with different laws. Whenever this person crosses the other community to get to his job, would he all of sudden be under their law now? I guess we kind of already have that with counties and states, but under anarchy the laws might vary greatly from community to community. Also do you believe anarchy would lead to more segregation? I think under anarchy people might not associate with other communites as much, which isn't neccessarily a good or bad thing, it's just an issue I'm wondering about. This could hurt the world economy as a whole and jeopardize free trade, and what if some communities decided to pass tarrifs or taxes, that people in their own communtiy might agree to, but not other communities? Do you think other communities would just stop doing business with them?
*Beckons and whispers into ear* "Paragraphs are a good once and a while... Just a tip..."
I challenge your whole premise that society will be divided up like this. While I expect to see some small and scattered enclaves of this type, especially with racial nationalists, I doubt that the entire world will split itself into such regions as law firms will be consistently battling for customers, and I really doubt that there will be much varyiance in law anywhere.
When you begin to respect people and stop thinking like a statist its really all down to defending property rights... Hell this is how most people live their lives already! Its live and let live for the most part, how many times have you seen a man threaten another man becuase say, he said the wrong thing or follows the wrong faith or is the wrong skin tone? The answer is that there is only a small minority which care about such things enough to even consider the utilization of force, but how many people do you know who would do so if someone was a thief or killer or rapist?
My bad, I noticed that as soon I posted it, I was in a little of a hurry.
I'm not saying this is how society would neccessarily end up in anarchy, but therotically it could end up in any type of way. Anybody can believe it would end up a certain way, but that dosen't that's how it would end up. Also remmeber, I'm not trying to be a critic of an anarchy, I'm just trying to understand different situations that could develop from it. Maybe I'm being a little to nit picky since I guess any type of situation could develop out of any system that it was not intended for.
I just have a hard time believing that just because there will be anarchy, the majority of people will have the same views. Humans are so different in how they view various things I think it could be hard getting so many people to believe the same views. I though that one of the elements of anarchy was commintuy chocie in that you are able to pay for which community you to live in (David Friedman talks a lot about this).
When you say hope for anarchy, are you just talking about Amercia, or the whole world? I'm sure you probably hope for the whole world to under anarchy but how could this ever happen now? It would be extremely difficult to be able to convince everyone anarchy is the way to go. Although my goal is to turn as many people to our way of thinking, I realistlcly know not everyone will agree with me.
Are you saying that there will no doubt be certain societies that may not want to cooperate with anarchy, but that I'm just thinking too much about it and blowing the number way out of porportion? Are there any readings of real historical examples of anarchy you can lead me to?
Welcome! I am 20 years old, new to Austrian economics and the forums, and have many of the same questions you have about anarchy. I think a good place to start would be the historical examples. I was thinking about starting a thread with that topic!
Proponents of limited government can look back on the American Revolution and the Constitution as a model of a free society. Although this "experiment" has ultimately failed, it provided countless opportunites for people to achieve happiness and prosperity (like you and your family). Many people nowadays look back on the "good old days" when the Constitution still meant something. What do anarchists look back on as real world success?
Here are some examples of stateless societies: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=C0AFF38F058C3D16&annotation_id=annotation_342726&feature=iv
I would recommend any of fringeelement's videos. He has a lot of videos addressing common questions about antistatism.
Thank you Cal 0. I look forward to watching the videos!